Posts by R A Hurley
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Hard News: An Easter whip-round,
*done*
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i just surfed here from (accidentally, i promise you!) reading the comments on a stuff.co.nz story... my mind thus filled with a toxic black ooze, i clicked over to PA to see a request for donations... and i thought "yes! take ALL of my money, just PLEASE don't leave me alone with those people!" (shorter version: i gave you as much money as i can spare, and my mother said to say she misses Media 7 terribly)
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Muse: OFF TOPIC: This Is What Your Brain…,
"I have read studies about civil unions which show they do not work. It causes chaos."
WTF!? Peer-reviewed journal articles or it didn’t happen…
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Josh Addison,
OK, now I can only think of Foghorn Leghorn. Russell, perhaps it would help your image if you were to start all posts with "Boy! Ah say, boy!" from now on...
Russell, I really think you ought to consider this. Foghorn Leghorn has, if nothing else, excellent Southern Good Ol' Boy cracker credentials. Might help you shed some of the Middle Class stink. Just something to think about......
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Russell Brown,
The middle-class thing certainly seems to have taken hold, via The Standard et al. I'm just a bit puzzled as to when and where I've claimed to be otherwise.
Also confusing is why that's supposed to be seen as an inherently bad thing. As if dropping the M-bomb automatically invalidates any argument you might make.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless,
from Bomber's link:
Who knew Russell Brown and Mr Smug over at the Fundy post were such sniveling apologists for Western foreign policy?
Speaking of unwarranted dichotomies... here comes one now.
Although I have to give it up for your description as a "middle class foghorn," Russell. So evocative!
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Russell Brown,
Quite. Some unattractive family customs of, say, Pakistani immigrants in Britain are often attributed to Islam, when they're at least as much about the tribal culture they've brought with them. Muslims in Bosnia exercise their faith quite differently to Muslims in Saudi Arabia because their influences are very different.
True indeed. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the religious component entirely. I don't think it is controversial to claim that religion frequently enjoys a position where being critical of it is seen as, at best, intolerably rude and, at worst, a violent assault on personal freedom. This means it is often the last flimsy justification standing when all other arguments against some awful practice have been dismissed. And because it has no real empirical content, it is the hardest to overcome.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Either you buy into these brutal bronze age and/or desert tribe morals and teachings or you dismiss them. There is no half way point surely. You can't pick and chose the 'word' as the times require.
I don't think you can carry my argument quite that far. All I wished to suggest was that morality is coming from some other source and being applied to religious texts. They are not the sole source of it. If they were, there would be no way to conceptualise the common modern notion that some bits are odious and should be ignored and that some bits aren't. The dichotomy you're offering could only take place if religious texts were an all or nothing proposition. That is: they are either the source of all morality, or the source of none at all. That is clearly an oversimplification. People draw moral inspiration from a variety of sources.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to chris,
I'd venture that OBL was no more true to his espoused religious bent than GWB was to Christ.
People from many faiths have done terrible things, and have frequently been able to cite chapter and verse/sura and hadith in support of their actions. This is often dismissed as not being "true" to the religion involved. Why should this be so? How do we know? We might have collectively decided that it is only the peaceful and non-violent sections of said texts that are "true" to the religion in question. But who are we to make that decision? Certainly this makes perfect sense if we want religious people to not re-enact the Book of Judges on the nice folks from the next town over, but it is human beings that have made that decision. The warm, fuzzy notion of religions as moral guardians is a useful fiction, but a fiction all the same. They are given the credit for the good, while the bad is charged to another account.
If, however, someone truly and strongly believes that their religious text is a moral guidebook, then deciding which pieces are truer than others would represent an imposition of an external morality upon a book which purports to be the only source of morality. For a genuine believer, this would be absurd. I think this explains what we know of Bin Laden's views quite well. Bin Laden claimed religious warrant for the very worst of his beliefs. That is, he was driven to obey/attempt to enforce passages of the Qur'an which others have chosen to ignore. But those passages are there. And, as a sincere believer, it is quite likely he did not see himself as having a great deal of choice in the matter. From the evidence available, I think it is quite disingenuous to claim that Bin Laden was not a genuine and sincere believer in the truth of his religion. On the contrary, it seems he was a good deal "truer" than most religious believers in the modern world, by the measure that he rejected less of his chosen text than most.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to chris,
I no longer have the inside word on genocidal maniacs' thought processes, but I'd venture that OBL was no more true to his espoused religious bent than GWB was to Christ.
Nobody is claiming access to Bin Laden's inner thoughts here. He was hardly a shy and retiring wallflower about expressing his political and religious views (although there wasn't really much daylight between the two). It is not unreasonable to suggest that his pronouncements in that regard were expressions of his thought processes. And if they weren't, that would make him a liar and manipulator of the sincere beliefs of others. Which would be even worse.